September 22, 2022

"In reality, feminist science offers a powerful set of tools for examining the history, context, and power structures in which scientific questions are asked."

"By bringing marginalized perspectives to the table, it can generate new questions and methodologies that help scientists identify and correct for hidden bias. Think of it as a stake strapped to a growing tree: it provides scaffolding to help the tree get back on track when it starts to lean too far to one side.... In 2012, [evolutionary biologist Patricia] Gowaty performed a series of careful replication experiments with fruit flies that challenged the longstanding 'Bateman’s Principle' of sexual selection. Her findings helped show that this principle, which states that males tend to be more promiscuous than females due to the asymmetry between sperm and eggs, was more of a hypothesis — and a flawed one at that."

Yet outside of gender studies departments, Gowaty’s work isn’t widely taught. Meanwhile, in hallowed halls like Oxford, Bateman’s Principle is still canon. Part of the reason, writes author Lucy Cooke in her recent book 'Bitch: On The Female of the Species,' is that Gowaty was effectively branded as an ideologically-driven feminist.... 
Even scientists I interviewed for my book... for instance, the urologist mapping the human clitoris to reveal an 'iceberg organ' or the bioengineer convincing her field that the uterus is a uniquely regenerative organ — balked at the idea of calling their work feminist.... 
What we lose when feminism is minimized is an understanding of how science actually works. Striking out the word 'feminist' perpetuates the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective — that when they enter the lab, they somehow strip off the values, quirks, and preconceptions that plague the rest of us mortals. In reality, the language of objectivity has long served as a cloak for political ends, whether it’s race science being used to support eugenic policies, or pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception.
ADDED: Here's a report on the Gowaty study, "Biologists reveal potential 'fatal flaw' in iconic sexual selection study" (Science Daily):
"Our team repeated Bateman's experiment and found that what some accepted as bedrock may actually be quicksand. It is possible that Bateman's paper should never have been published." ...
The original experiment on Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the common fruit fly, was performed by creating multiple, isolated populations with either five males and five females or three of each gender in a jar. The insects mated freely in the experimental populations, and Bateman examined the children that made it to adulthood. 
To count the number of adult offspring engendered by each of his original insect subjects, Bateman needed a reliable way to match parents with children. Nowadays, modern geneticists would use molecular evidence to determine the genetic parentage of each child, but DNA analysis was not available in the 1940s. Instead, Bateman chose his initial specimens carefully, selecting D. melanogaster flies that each had a unique, visible mutation that could be transferred from parent to child, Gowaty said. 
The mutations were extreme. Some of the flies had curly wings, others thick bristles, and still others had eyes reduced in size to narrow slits. The outward differences in each breeding subject allowed Bateman to work backward to determine the parentage of some of the fly progeny and to document each mating pair among the original insects. A child with curly wings and thick bristles, for example, could only have come from one possible pairing. 
Yet Bateman's method, which was cutting-edge for its time, had a "fatal flaw," according to Gowaty. Imagine the child of a curly-winged mother and an eyeless father. The child has an equal chance of having both mutations, only the father's mutation, only the mother's mutation or no mutation at all. In order to know who mated with whom, Bateman used only the children with two mutations, because these were the only ones for which he could specifically identify both the mother and father. But by counting only the children with two mutations, Bateman probably got a skewed sample, Gowaty said. 
In repeating Bateman's experiment, she and her colleagues found that the flies with two severe mutations are less likely to survive into adulthood. Flies use their wings not only to hover but also to sing during courtship, which is why curly wings present a huge disadvantage. Specimens with deformed eyes might have an even tougher time surviving. The 25 percent of children born with both mutations were even more likely to die before being counted by Bateman or Gowaty. 
"It's not surprising that the kids died like flies when they got one dramatic mutation from mom and another dramatic mutation from dad," she said. Gowaty found that the fraction of double-mutant offspring was significantly below the expected 25 percent, which means Bateman would have been unable to accurately quantify the number of mates for each adult subject. 
Further, his methodology resulted in more offspring being assigned to fathers than mothers, something that is impossible when each child must have both a father and a mother, Gowaty said. Bateman concluded that male fruit flies produce many more viable offspring when they have multiple mates but that females produce the same number of adult children whether they have one mate or many. But Gowaty and her colleagues, by performing the same experiment, found that the data were decidedly inconclusive. In their repetition -- and possibly in Bateman's original study -- the data failed to match a fundamental assumption of genetic parentage assignments. 
Specifically, the markers used to identify individual subjects were influencing the parameters being measured (the number of mates and the number of offspring). When offspring die from inherited marker mutations, the results become biased, indicating that the method is unable to reliably address the relationship between the number of mates and the number of offspring, said Gowaty. 
Nonetheless, Bateman's figures are featured in numerous biology textbooks, and the paper has been cited in nearly 2,000 other scientific studies. "Here was a classic paper that has been read by legions of graduate students, any one of whom is competent enough to see this error," Gowaty said. "Bateman's results were believed so wholeheartedly that the paper characterized what is and isn't worth investigating in the biology of female behavior." 
Repeating key studies is a tenet of science, which is why Bateman's methodology should have been retried as soon as it became important in the 1970s, she said. Those who blindly accept that females are choosy while males are promiscuous might be missing a big piece of the puzzle. 
"Our worldviews constrain our imaginations," Gowaty said. "For some people, Bateman's result was so comforting that it wasn't worth challenging. I think people just accepted it."... 

AND: I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to embrace the term "feminist science." I think Gross's point is that scientists — like everyone else — are vulnerable to confirmation bias, and sometimes the bias is anti-feminist. The correction isn't to adopt a feminist bias, just to become clear-sighted and neutral about detecting bias in either direction. Feminism may drive your enthusiasm to see masculinist bias. You can't duplicate every experiment, and you choose Bateman because you're aggravated and skeptical about this males-love-to-fuck ingredient in the scientific analysis. But in the end, you've got to do your own study properly.

PLUS: Can we talk about the analogy — "a stake strapped to a growing tree... provides scaffolding to help the tree get back on track when it starts to lean too far to one side."

First, scaffolding is the wrong word. Scaffolding doesn't straighten things out. It's a structure used for workers as they build or repair a structure. There are no workers using the tree stakes to do things to the tree.

Second, it's usually detrimental to the growth of a tree to stake it. If you want to use staking a tree as your analogy, you should know more about the things gardeners consider when deciding whether to stake a tree:

Staking a tree that does not need it can do more harm than good. Movement of the trunk helps strengthen it by thickening it and giving it taper from bottom to top. Trunk movement also stimulates root growth... Movement of a tree above where it is tied too tightly to a stake, like movement of an unstaked trunk, results in a thicker trunk above the tie. This difference in thickness upsets smooth travel of water and nutrients up and down the developing trunk....

Your opponents will use your analogies against you, even when it has little to do with the argument you're making. If scientists have been biased — leaning (like a tree?) — then we ought to tie them to a rigid structure pointing in the direction that you believe is straight?  

102 comments:

tim in vermont said...

So did she ask the fruit flies? Or did she heavily lard her interpretation of the data with assumptions?

A mammal is not a fruit fly.

Jersey Fled said...

Or...

You can find scientific confirmation for almost anything if you let your politics drive your science.

Remember when "scientists" about 20 years ago found a "gay gene" that caused homosexuals to be homosexual? Or when they "discovered" that the brains of homosexuals more closely resembled female brains than male?

And I won't even get into how "climate scientists" find that anthropic global warming causes everything from halitosis to male pattern baldness.

Enigma said...

Not too long ago parents routinely taught their children a couple simple morality tales:

"The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf" who caused problems because no wolves were present.

"Chicken Little" who anxiously said the sky was falling when it rained.



This has been forgotten or never learned by blind ideologues. When you see the world through tinted ideology goggles all the the world will appear to be tinted.

Mike Sylwester said...

By bringing marginalized perspectives to the table, it can generate new questions and methodologies that help scientists identify and correct for hidden bias.

This argument for racial and sexual diversity is offered frequently.

The idea is that intellectual progress is impeded because "marginalized perspectives" are ignored. If some group comprises just White males, then they will not think of considerations that would be considered if a Black and/or woman were added to the group.

The "marginalized persons" enrich the group intellectually.

I suppose that might be true in some situations.

On the other hand, there might be some situations where an intellectual group's progress might be impeded by the addition of "marginalized persons" who are significantly less intelligent or who are trouble-makers.

For example, imagine an intellectual group that is making good progress, but then this writer, Rachel E. Gross, is added to the group. She obviously is a stupid trouble-maker.

When Rachel Gross is added to such a group, then its intellectual progress will slow down and might even stop or reverse.

Mike Sylwester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
gilbar said...

marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception."

i'll bite! When DOES it start?
24 weeks?
labor?
birth?
"old enough to eat chicken soup"?
13 years?
18?
ever?

Dave Begley said...

“ the longstanding 'Bateman’s Principle' of sexual selection. Her findings helped show that this principle, which states that males tend to be more promiscuous than females due to the asymmetry between sperm and eggs….”

That’s not it.

Men just like to fuck more than women. Amiright?

RideSpaceMountain said...

Hey God? Can I have my fucking rib back?

Tks,
Adam

rhhardin said...

Male scientists are interested in the thing they're studying. If anything it's an escape from women.

Josephbleau said...

“Striking out the word 'feminist' perpetuates the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective — that when they enter the lab, they somehow strip off the values, quirks, and preconceptions that plague the rest of us mortals. In reality, the language of objectivity has long served as a cloak for political ends, whether it’s race science being used to support eugenic policies, or pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception."

What gibberish, what complete and utter vacuousness. To think that a Lawyer or anyone else “proves” anything outside a set of rigid postulates is the height of stupidity. We make hypotheses, then we do experiments to try to reject them. That’s all we do, over and over. If we can’t reject then we discuss the consequences of the hypotheses, assuming they may be true. Lawyers make hypotheses, the jury often rejects them.

Why do we do this? Because it’s a process that gives reliable long term results. Unfortunately some, like the author here, think the process is bad, because sometimes it does not confirm their biases.

mikemtgy said...

I would be afraid to brand some of these studies as Science. The problem isn’t whether they are feminist.

chickelit said...

Slate has always been my go to source for cutting edge science.

chickelit said...

The notion that objectivity is something to fight is really fucked.

Christopher B said...

When every you say "adjective noun" you're not talking about "noun" any more.

chickelit said...

It’s horn tooting.

Beasts of England said...

Don’t take scientific advice from Slate. You’re welcome.

Amadeus 48 said...

"In reality, the language of objectivity has long served as a cloak for political ends, whether it’s race science being used to support eugenic policies, or pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception."

But the language of feminism, of course, makes no pretense of objectivity and is nakedly political from the git-go.

Didn't the progressives push eugenics? Why, yes they did. And is eugenics still in good odor in Western intellectual life since the Third Reich? Only in horse-breeding circles. I think that eugenics was discredited 90 years ago.

And it is odd indeed that "pro-life lawyers", who by definition are advocates, are included as the other great example of persons using the cloak of objectivity "to allegedly prove that life starts at conception." That is a very strange way to describe the role of an advocate who is trying to persuade a tribunal. Was the original Roe decision based on objectivity? I think the dissenters said it was an exercise of "raw judicial power".

This piece appears to be sadly confused, probably because of the author's inability to see herself and her arguments clearly.

Bob Boyd said...

I agree with her.
Say the quiet part out loud. Tell us who you are and what you are doing and why.

peacelovewoodstock said...

"iceberg organ"? That's an unfortunate metaphor.

Critter said...

The same points about bringing different perspectives to science can be said about everyone, male or female. This is an example of taking one aspect of a person and using it to glorify all who share it. Why not focus on redheads, or left-habders?

This is also a reason I don’t read feminist articles like this one. Boring tripe.

Big Mike said...

In reality, the language of objectivity has long served as a cloak for political ends, whether it’s race science being used to support eugenic policies, or pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception.

So “feminist science” is about abortion? Because these two examples are about abortion.

And, yes, science can get itself trapped by paradigms. If you’re going to challenge the accepted model for how things work you’re goi g to have to do more than show that it was concocted by old, white, men. You have to show that you have a new paradigm that explains everything that the old paradigm does, and also explains observations that the old paradigms did not. Plate tectonics versus continents fixed in their present locations. Phlogiston versus oxidation. Relativity versus Newtonian mechanics. Quantum mechanics.

Amadeus 48 said...

For a more robust understanding of science, see this column by Andy Kessler in Monday's WSJ:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-faraday-is-worth-1-000-faucis-science-electricity-computer-dynamo-equity-fairness-stem-pandemic-pew-trust-experts-11663505143

Jake said...

Umm. I don’t get it.

rwnutjob said...

You spelled moron wrong

donald said...

Bless her heart.

donald said...

Bless her heart.

Dave Begley said...

“According to Greek mythology, the prophet Tiresias was harassing a pair of mating snakes when Hera decided to transform him into a woman as “punishment.” After he had lived in this form for seven years, she changed him back. Later, when asked by Hera and Zeus to settle an argument over which sex has the most pleasure in intercourse (Hera thought men; Zeus said women), Tiresias replied, Women.“

From Scientific American.

Owen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Owen said...

Does “feminist science” offer falsifiable predictions? Can “feminist experiments” be reproduced by peers and especially by rivals?

If not, it isn’t science. From the sound of the “research” cited in the article —hunting for “iceberg organs” and the like— there are too many grant-hungry PhD’s running around. Encourage them to learn to code. Or weld. Or repair power lines.

Bob Boyd said...

Another thing we should stop being be afraid to say,
No grants for scientists whose work won't serve the cause of social justice!

If scientists won't be loud and proud about their eagerness and intention to serve the cause, if they can't demonstrate that their work will serve the cause, then they don't need to be doing science. What is the point of doing science that will take us backward?

Quaestor said...

Not an oxymoron.
Just a moron.

Kevin said...

What we lose when feminism is minimized is an understanding of how science actually works.

I doubt Madam Curie would agree.

Quaestor said...

Not an oxymoron.
Just a moron.

Sebastian said...

"'Feminist Science' Is Not an Oxymoron"

It is, until a "feminist scientist" produces findings that upset feminism as ideology.

The special pleading for "feminist science" itself shows that it is an ideological project.

Temujin said...

First of all, perspectives are not 'marginalized' because the person may have a vagina, or darker skin, or likes to think of themselves as multi-gendered. Perspectives are marginalized by their lack of substance.

"Striking out the word 'feminist' perpetuates the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective..."
And there you have it. The nub of her article. The backbone of deconstruction. The very idea that science being based on facts, trial and error, and testing and retesting of hypotheses is now 'outdated'. Rather, bring those insipid little personal beliefs, quirks, prejudices into your work and let them shine! Show those damnable men what real science can be.

I look forward to the New Dark Ages.

I guess I could have just written, "Slate!" and have been done with it.

Howard said...

The predictable responses herein are based on the foundations of deplorable science.

Just like the predictable response and response edits of the myth buster coverall gyrl are based on the fundamental postulates and axioms of feminism science.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

“…marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception."

So they are going to redefine the zygote for feminism? Once that egg is fertilized then the zygote has unique DNA, different from the mother (egg) and father (sperm). No other living thing on earth has the same DNA. If that’s not a unique life growing there in that potentially birthing-in-9-months person then what is it?

The rest of the paragraph was kooky enough we knew it would wind up on it weird note. So to be a good feminist one must believe there is still a magical “quickening” when that (unique) lump of cells becomes ALIVE?

Seamus said...

Men just like to fuck more than women. Amiright?

Naw, I'm happy fucking just women. I don't need to fuck anything more.

retail lawyer said...

She lost me at "marginalized". Expect gibberish to follow.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

It’s just propaganda if all your examples are scientists until we get to her random right wing anti-science example being a lawyer not a scientist. Being a good feminist means not knowing the difference between doing science and doing law. Way to go Rachel!

Randomizer said...

Christopher B said...
"When every you say "adjective noun" you're not talking about "noun" any more."

Feminist science certainly isn't science. The purpose of the Scientific Method is to reduce personal bias and self-interest. Objectivity is fundamental to valid science.

'whether it’s race science being used to support eugenic policies, or pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception."

Science can be used for good or bad purposes. These are examples of using science, not science itself. Good on the author for using examples from the Left and the Right.

Tom T. said...

New research challenging old theories is not feminist science, it's just science. And old scientists being resistant to new theories is a phenomenon as old as science itself.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Althouse‘a excerpt gets better every time I read it. It starts, “IN REALITY…,” so you know she’s just laying out da facts here. LOL. Facts! Or Lysenkoism.

Kate said...

The language of subjectivity is also a cloak for political ends. Just science the shit out of things, please.

Earnest Prole said...

The question of whether the clitoris should be referred to as an “iceberg organ” is a hot-button issue that can be triggering for some (but not all) women.

tim maguire said...

The idea is not completely without merit, but they've taken it in a dark direction.

For instance, in medical research, priorities, and therefore dollars, tend to be doled out according to what scares us most. So if the people making the decisions are all white men, then the things that scare white men are sure to get plenty of attention. If you want things that mostly effect women or minorities to get their due, then women and minorities need to be in the room when the decision is made.

But that is afar cry from saying this woman discovered something about fruit flies because she's a woman and her research should be labelled women's research. That is pointlessly divisive. If her research has merit (obviously not established in this essay), then there is no need to label it women's science and it will disseminate more readily if not weighed down by this needless baggage.

Quaestor said...

History is already supplied with examples of politized science. There was socialist agronomy in the Soviet Union, introduced by Stalin in the person of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. His chief contribution was to hand the Cold War laurels to Ronald Reagan and the United States. Financial exhausted by year after year of "bad harvests" made good by buying Kansas wheat at market prices Russian communism collapsed attempting to match American technology. To gainsay Lysenko's "vernalization" nonsense was to court Siberian exile and even a bullet in the brain. Lysenko denounced genetics as anti-Soviet, and Stalin dutifully expunged the entire accomplishment of the field since Gregor Mendel's pea garden from every book, publication, and manuscript that could be found anywhere behind the Iron Curtain. When Soviet biologists were finally allowed to study and lecture in the West under perestroika, people were shocked to discover that they knew nothing of Watson and Crick, not even their names. Even now Russian contributions in the field of genetics and evolutionary developmental biology are minor league at best.

Another important benefit of politized science was the complete failure of National Socialist German in the field of nuclear physics. Hitler had no Bomb to mate with his rockets because he banned "Jewish physics" in the Third Reich.

To establish feminist science, first establish a coherent and agreed-upon definition of feminism. The world awaits will eyes rolled.

Buckwheathikes said...

You know how to detect whether "feminist science" is a bunch of bullshit so Democrats can get political advantage?

Slate writes about it.

That's the dead giveaway that it's all bullshit.

Buckwheathikes said...

You know how to detect whether "feminist science" is a bunch of bullshit so Democrats can get political advantage?

Slate writes about it.

That's the dead giveaway that it's all bullshit.

Dave Begley said...

Seamus:

You caught me! Let me rephrase it. Scientific evidence proves that men like to fuck at a higher rate than women do. Men will fuck as many women as they can and as often as they can. It's a hormone thing.

ccscientist said...

"pro-life lawyers marshalling studies to allegedly prove that life starts at conception"--life actually does start at conception, but the question is what value do we put on that life. No scientist seeks to prove that the soul enters the embryo at conception, which a religious concept.

MikeR said...

Plenty of comments, but: I like the answer so people should accept it, is not science. I don't like the answer so it's wrong, is not science.
We are learning in a number of different fields how difficult it is to do real science when people have answers they want.

Quaestor said...

Tom T. writes. "New research challenging old theories is not feminist science, it's just science."

However, much of that recent "science" is not reproducible or even peer-reviewed. Feminist science has already become the laughingstock of the world. Recall subliminal advertising? How about Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, does that ring a bell? There are many others. The girls keep stepping on the same rake, year after year, as they reject the entire philosophy of science as patriarchy.

ccscientist said...

In studies of animal behavior it is perhaps valid to ask if feminism could be useful. For example, there is a current claim that singing by female birds has been ignored. I do not know if this is true but it is plausible. In studies of primates, early studies focused on male behavior too much. Feminism goes off the rails however, when it insists that math is sexist. Not the academics of math (ie the ratio of M/F profs) but math itself (or geology or whatever). That is a claim that is looney tunes and without support or logic.

Rusty said...

"Feminist Science"
Is this about sammiches?

Paul said...

Science is supposed to be about facts. No politics. It is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.One uses systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

FACTS... not politics.

To twist science to become a political animal is, well like when religion was supreme they thought the universe revolved around earth and any objection become blasphemy.

This author is just a far left 'feminist'. Like this gender bullshit... woke views.

Woe be when you mix politics with science... when you do that all you get a Fauci.

Gahrie said...

the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective

Without objectivity, it's not science.

Gahrie said...

The notion that objectivity is something to fight is really fucked.

It's just as bad as the idea that people should be treated equitably instead of equally.

Big O's Meanings Dictionary said...

science - definition

NOUN

1
a : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science

2
a : a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study: the science of theology
b : something (such as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge: have it down to a science

3 : a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws: cooking is both a science and an art

4 capitalized : CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

5 : the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding


sci·en·tif·ic meth·od - definition

NOUN

a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses: "criticism is the backbone of the scientific method"· The purpose of this sequence is to remove subjectivity from the process.


discussion

At this point, only the physical sciences use the scientific method, rendering others such as "comic book science" and "sociological science" as no more than accumulated databases.

There are those who attempt to inject subjectivity into science, most notably IDers and feminists, both being especially sensitive and downright hostile to criticism.

Maynard said...

I am all for new questions and methodologies, but if you have a political agenda you are not a scientist. You are an activist and your "research" should be viewed as such.

One of my leftwing professors in grad school (1980) proposed a hermeneutical method of research that would benefit "the community". It was total bullshit and showed that he was lucky to get tenure that was not based on scientific research. He was an activist, not a researcher.

AlbertAnonymous said...

I don’t think Rachel is an oxymoron, just a moron. Who publishes this garbage?

rhhardin said...

Objectivity is throwing something in the way, etymologically.

Ann Althouse said...

"So did she ask the fruit flies? Or did she heavily lard her interpretation of the data with assumptions?"

Or did Bateman and the people who accepted Bateman?

Read the material I added to the post.

Everyone is vulnerable to confirmation bias, including you as you react to the little bit I excerpted for a blog post.

Tina Trent said...

A good bit of the so-called feminist science is actually being promoted as such because of the push to include women scientists, or in some cases to recognize the work of some who were genuinely disregarded a century ago.

The latter is a good goal. The former is politics. In Our Time, a fine BBC radio show, does a good job of walking that line rationally and with a surprising diversity of scholarship. Not identity politics diversity, but by discussions with real scholars and experts that painfully highlight their superiority in holding back the forces of identity academia at the elite levels -- so far.

Bateman's Principle is hardly groundbreaking, but she is being held up as only able to draw such conclusions because of her sex. Hardly progress. A whole lot of "feminist science" from its first heyday is discreditable or shallow sociology. As was a lot of scholarship at that time done by men, and a whole lot of the current evolutionary biology craze beloved by pissy libertarians and leftists who are no less blinded by their own political biases.

I think I've finally figured out why Slate Magazine exists. It is cursed, reverse alchemy. It turns interesting subjects into incurious hogwash.

CJinPA said...

"the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective"

There is no more efficient way to undermine faith in science, and therefore reduce science-based policy, than to openly encourage scientists to politicize their work.

Whether any endeavor can be 100 percent objective is besides the point. The vast majority of people *think* science should be and is largely objective. Messing with that is anti-intellectual.

Lurker21 said...

Canadian "social neuroendocrinologist" Sari van Anders was a blog topic a week or two back. Was it here? Van Anders has quite a background in feminism. In science maybe not so much. She's known the answers since she was the child of a feminist mother and has been trying to back them up with evidence, or at least with arguments, ever since IMHO.

Krumhorn said...

I don’t assume for a second that she accurately reported the details of Bateman’s experiments.

- Krumhorn

ccscientist said...

When you submit a scientific article, you can choose to just use your first initial with your last name so no one knows what sex you are.
30 some years ago feminists declared that they were going to develop a feminist math--it never happened of course because it is a nonsense term. Feminist history or psychology or whatever is well known for being tripe.

ccscientist said...

When you submit a scientific article, you can choose to just use your first initial with your last name so no one knows what sex you are.
30 some years ago feminists declared that they were going to develop a feminist math--it never happened of course because it is a nonsense term. Feminist history or psychology or whatever is well known for being tripe.

Joe Smith said...

If person-kind only adhered to 'feminist science,' we'd all be living in mud huts in the dark.

Good luck with that...

Lurker21 said...

Angus John Bateman was a Communist. That doesn't necessarily make him wrong about science, but 70 years ago we'd be arguing about whether Marxism "offers a powerful set of tools for examining the history, context, and power structures in which scientific questions are asked." Maybe, in some quarters, people are still arguing about that.

Wikipedia tells us, "Bateman was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the Lysenko affair. He was an anti-Lysenkoist within the Party whilst writing in defense of Lysenko for non-Party audiences." Dialetics! Is it still at work today?

Bateman wasn't related to the Geoffrey Bateson who was married to Margaret Mead, but the similarity of the names makes me wonder if Mead's feminism made her a better or worse anthropologist or if it had mixed effects or no effect at all.

n.n said...

There is mystery in sex and conception? We need to despermify, deeggify... nay, decarbonize in order to reduce the "burden".

That said, women, men, and "our Posterity" are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.

RNB said...

'Feminist Science' is to 'Science' as 'Military Music' is to 'Music.'

n.n said...

If person-kind only adhered to 'feminist science,' we'd all be living in mud huts in the dark.

in back... black holes... whores h/t NAACP, wearing period pads, and bearing children... "burdens" h/t Obama through self-identification in a state of dysfunctional evolution.

That said, women, men, and "our Posterity" are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.

Rocco said...

From the article:
"What we lose when feminism is minimized is an understanding of how science actually works. Striking out the word 'feminist' perpetuates the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective..."

Da, comrade, let's embrace the new Soviet science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

But we should always be wary of Jewish Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

hombre said...

"By bringing marginalized perspectives to the table, it can generate new questions and methodologies that help scientists identify and correct for hidden bias."


Feminist perspectives are often marginalized for good reasons. Here's one: Science and feminist science are different. It's sort of like 2+2=4 is white supremacist arithmetic, or whatever.

n.n said...

Case-in-point: babies are delivered by Stork at the time of convenience, but not after the age of profit.

Jupiter said...

There are, in fact, many different kinds of science. The largest dichotomy is between those sciences that are experimental, and those, like cosmology, that are necessarily only observational. But there are scads of subtler differences. It would seem that a "feminist" approach to scientific reasoning might be useful in biological sciences, especially if one posits that practitioners of biological sciences have been biased in other ways in the past.

But that's all a bunch of hooey, of course. This bullshit is the predictable result of several decades of encouraging women to enter the sciences. We now have a fine big batch of incompetent female scientists, and they are doing what women always do; first they claim they have been unfairly excluded. When they are allowed to participate, they claim the game is rigged against them. And they insist that the rules be changed so that they can be successful. And when they have ruined everything, they jet off to conferences where they sip white wine and whine about how hard it is to be a woman in science. Christ, if you couldn't fuck 'em, there'd be a bounty on them.

JK Brown said...

We all learned about scientific bias toward stereotypes for females from the 1995 movie 'Species'. Well, it was used as a joke at least for the non-biologists

Xavier Fitch: We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable.
Preston Lennox: More docile and controllable, eh? You guys don't get out much.

https://youtu.be/IerddGM-xO0?t=117

Achilles said...

Amadeus 48 said...

Didn't the progressives push eugenics? Why, yes they did. And is eugenics still in good odor in Western intellectual life since the Third Reich? Only in horse-breeding circles. I think that eugenics was discredited 90 years ago.

They just renamed it abortion.

Every goal of the Eugenics movement is just slightly reworded for the Abortion movement.

Some babies are still "unwanted."

Yancey Ward said...

How many men have tried to impregnate Ms. Gross?

Big Mike said...

Everyone is vulnerable to confirmation bias

@Althouse, yes and no. Teaching yourself to ask “in what ways can I be wrong?” is hard to do. but one can work at and get pretty close to 100%. Applying this to feminist ideas such as “math is a patriarchal construct” suggests to me that 21st century feminism is anti-science.

Smilin' Jack said...

“Our worldviews constrain our imaginations," Gowaty said. "For some people, Bateman's result was so comforting that it wasn't worth challenging.”

That’s certainly how I feel. When my worldview is challenged, I remember the fruit flies, remember the fruit flies...

Yancey Ward said...

I can see that Bateman's assumption of 25% of double mutations is wrong for very obvious reasons, but not that it matters to the overall conclusion of Bateman's work- all he was doing was doing a count on a subset of the population pool of the flies he studied, and extrapolated that result to the entire pool, a not unreasonable thing to do.

Females can mate with as many men as men mate with women, but women very, very rarely carry the offspring of two different men at the same time, while a man can have multiple women pregnant at the same time. Just casual observation should tell anyone with an IQ in the triple digits this means men do better at transferring their genetic blueprint into the future by mating with as many women as possible- a man can literally have thousands of children if he is persistent and is allowed to do so, while a woman is going to be limited at the top to exactly the number of eggs she is born with, and far under that if she carries them to term herself. Bateman, as far as I can tell, was simply demonstrating in flies what we already observe in some societies of human beings and other mammals.

Jupiter said...

Chess is a game which is almost entirely mental. Yet there is a separate system of competitions, in which only women are allowed to play. Are they, perhaps, playing "feminist chess"?

Jupiter said...

"a man can literally have thousands of children if he is persistent and is allowed to do so, while a woman is going to be limited at the top to exactly the number of eggs she is born with, and far under that if she carries them to term herself."

True, but it's hard to see what that has to do with fruit flies.

There are lots of species of fish in which both sexes release their gametes into the water. Are we going to claim that the males release their sperm in a promiscuous fashion, while the females release their eggs with that one, certain fish in mind?

Biology is vastly contingent, and evolutionary reasoning is inherently unfalsifiable. It sounds to me like Bateman's "work" was an aerial gamete release.

Michael K said...

Bullshit is popular with feminists and CRT advocates.

Original Mike said...

I am reminded of the Nazis, who called relativity "Jewish Science".

What a load of tripe.

Original Mike said...

I am reminded of the Nazis, who called relativity "Jewish Science".

What a load of tripe.

Real American said...

inserting "feminist" in front of a subject matter turns it into an inherently political endeavor. the last thing we need is more politics in our science (or anything else).

Joe Smith said...

'30 some years ago feminists declared that they were going to develop a feminist math...'

A woman buys an Armani cocktail dress for $1,500 marked down from $2,500.

She brings it home to show her husband and gleefully exclaims, "We just saved a thousand dollars!"

Feminist math...

Tina Trent said...

Ms. Gross also simply denies the fact that epidemiology or public health -- which she mislabels feminist science in the example she is using -- was a field invented long ago. By a man. As our ability to do so progressed, it has always been normal practice to look to both biological/hormonal/genetic and public health criteria (behavioral patterns, epidemiology) to battle an epidemic. It is an abject lie that none of the researchers in the world were considering epidemiology to explain differences between male and female Covid mortality until they were schooled by "feminist science." That is just such an amazing lie, I can only assume it comes from the transgender-prostrate school of feminism -- the one that seeks to deny biological sex differences under the guise of science.

Science and Catholicism both mark the moment of conception as the joining of sperm and egg. Some other faiths have different starting points for pregnancy with different legal and moral implications. In our law, uterine implantation is the start of a pregnancy. This is law, not science, and pregnancy, not conception.

Pro-choice activists, male and female, scientist and not, have also labored mightily to avoid scientific research into whether the most common form of chemical contraception ("the pill") prevents conception, prevents implantation, or both. The legal, social, religious, and financial consequences of looking to the science would be profound.

So the feminist scientific method, in this case, is to look away.

Tina Trent said...

Whoops, I wrote Bateman above when I meant Gowaty. Must be my hormones.

Ann Althouse said...

I have something in common with Gowaty: the middle name Adair.

tim in vermont said...

The fruit fly study was crap when it was done by a man, and refuting it proves nothing. It’s like saying your dog is not that smart because you beat it four out of five games at chess. It’s all nonsense, but if that study had some kind of standing in the scientific community, then refuting it was not “feminist science,” it was science.

If women are not selective, they waste one of a dozen, maybe an outlier max of eighteen reproductive opportunities. Mammals have been evolving since the dinosaurs, we likely split from whatever became insects a billion years ago. The raw economics of fruit fly reproduction are entirely different.

I suppose that nobody looked at it because the conclusion was consonant with observed behavior and logic, insofar as questioning it came from a female perspective, that’s great, but if she imagines that she has somehow proven the opposite, that’s nonsense.

linsee said...

When parents who both carry a gene for a lethal disease (Tay-Sachs, for instance, or sickle-cell anemia) use genetic analysis of early embryos to avoid giving birth to a child who will live in pain and die young, they are practicing eugenics. When a woman chooses a sperm donor she is practicing eugenics. As long as no one uses the word, most people think would-be parents are right to do that, or at least have the right to make such a choice.

The problem with eugenics as government policy is that the government decided it had the right to decide for people whether they should be allowed to have children, and to enforce their decision by sterilizing people without their consent.

It has not escaped our notice that government decisions often have worse outcomes than would have resulted absent government interference.

tim in vermont said...

Imagine using fruit flies to prove that Canada geese don’t have an inborn instinct to migrate.

John Fisher said...

Richard Feynmann smiles.

Maynard said...

I have something in common with Gowaty: the middle name Adair.

Did you have the nickname "Triple A"?

I wanted a cool nickname in Jr. High, but nothing stuck.

Krumhorn said...

As i suspected, Gowaty did not accurately report Bateman's methods or conclusions. The single assertion made by Bateman that was not supported by the data he compiled was that the intra-sexual selection among males (in differentiation from the passivity and selection process of females) identified by Darwin and confirmed in Bateman's experiments would seem to be due to the fact "that females produce much fewer gametes than males. Consequently, there is competition between male gametes for the fertilisation of the female gametes".

In a paper published a couple of months ago in Nature, the author demonstrated conclusively that this assertion of Bateman was true regardless of whether fertilization was internal or external. And the paper describes a process that was explicitly designed to remove "sex-biased assumptions" using symmetrical mathematical models "so that at any time it is possible to arbitrarily change the labels for males and females but reach the same conclusions." His work is completely transparent. In spite of the advances in experimental methods rendering Bateman's "approach outdated", the mathematical foundations of Bateman's work have been validated and strengthened. and his "writing more than 70 years ago was remarkably prescient in explaining the causes of the mainstream flow of sexual differentiation."

As Kate so succinctly put it above: The language of subjectivity is also a cloak for political ends. Just science the shit out of things, please.

- Krumhorn



Greg The Class Traitor said...

'Feminist Science' Is Not an Oxymoron/Researchers are often afraid to label their work as 'feminist.' They shouldn’t be!" (Slate).

Yes, they should be, because "Feminist Science" is just as much of an oxymoron as "jumbo shrimp"

Part of the reason, writes author Lucy Cooke in her recent book 'Bitch: On The Female of the Species,' is that Gowaty was effectively branded as an ideologically-driven feminist....
Well, that would be because that's how she presented herself.

What we lose when feminism is minimized is an understanding of how science actually works. Striking out the word 'feminist' perpetuates the outdated idea that scientists should (and can) be objective

Hood science IS objective. That's why "reproducibility" is the hallmark of valid scientific research: Because if you get that answer, but no one else does, then your subjective answer is objectively wrong

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Repeating key studies is a tenet of science, which is why Bateman's methodology should have been retried as soon as it became important in the 1970s, she said

That's nice.

It's now the 2020s, and the DNA / molecular markers exist so you can do a version of the study without any necessary defective mutations.

So, has she done it? Why not?
Or has she done it, found that Bateman was correct, and suppressed the results because they dont' accord with her "feminist" desires?